It is time once again for a Top 100 Films of All-Time list. As I’ve done for the last few years, the first ten spots on the list comprise a hypothetical Sight & Sound-style ballot. We had an on-going project related to this on The George Sanders Show, that will now be based at Seattle Screen Scene. This top ten is presented here in chronological order. The remaining 90 films were randomly selected from a consideration set of 446 films, which excluded films that made my Top Tens in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.

1. Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

2. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)

3. A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell & Emeric Presburger, 1944)

4. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

5. I am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)

6. Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985)

7. Kiki’s Delivery Service (Hayao Miyazaki, 1989)

8. A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)

9. The Matrix (Lana & Lilly Wachowski, 1999)

10. Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004)

11. Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-1998)

12. The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Parajanov, 1969)

13. Lonesome (Paul Fejos, 1928)

14. Romancing in Thin Air (Johnnie To, 2012)

15. Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)

16. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

17. Applause (Rouben Mamoulian, 1929)

18. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

19. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

20. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, 1974)

21. La danse (Frederick Wiseman, 2009)

22. The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

23. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)

24. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

25. Red Cliff (John Woo, 2008)

26. Don’t Look Back (DA Pennebaker, 1967)

27. The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

28. Raining in the Mountain (King Hu, 1979)

29. Love Exposure (Sion Sono, 2008)

30. Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933)

31. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)

32. Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997)

33. One Week (Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline, 1920)

34. A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)

35. How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941)

36. Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

37. The Contract (Michael Hui, 1978)

38. The Bellboy (Jerry Lewis, 1960)

39. The Mirror (Jafar Panahi, 1997)

40. PTU (Johnnie To, 2003)

41. M. Hulot’s Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953)

42. Throw Down (Johnnie To, 2004)

43. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

44. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

45. High School (Frederick Wiseman, 1968)

46. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

47. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson, 2004)

48. Bound for the Fields, the Mountains and the Seacoast (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1986)

We are now halfway through the year and as has become anannual traditionhere at The End, it’s time to look back at the best movies of the year so far. As I discussed in the 2013 halfway post, the consensus movie-dating system is nonsensical and posits New York as the center of the universe. Far more logical (and much easier to use) is a system reliant on imdb’s dating system, which locates a film in whatever year it first played for an audience. That’s what we use here for all Rankings & Awards as it’s the most fair to all eras and areas. (A dating system reliant on playing in a certain locality I think can be valuable for a publication that is geographically specific, like a local newspaper or website. But here at The End, we have a global reach.)

A by-product of the system is that a number of films that first go into wide-release in any given year actually had their premiere in the year before. A number of the films on many critics’ halfway-point lists will include these films, films that find their proper home here on my 2017 list. And so here we have two lists: the Best Movies of 2018, following the strict imdb dating system, and the Best 2017 Movies of 2018, which includes those films from last year that you might find on a more chronologically-illogical list. I also have a third list, Best Unreleased Movies of 2017, of last year’s films that have yet to see a New York release and therefore don’t (yet) exist by the standards of most critics. And a fourth list, a halfway version of my annual Best Older Movies list, counting the top movies I saw for the first time this year that are more than a few years old.

Over at the Chinese Cinema I’ve been hard at work revising a bunch of old reviews, and I’ve completed the following director categories: The Pantheon, The Far Side of Paradise, Expressive Esoterica, Fringe Benefits, Less Than Meets the Eye, Lightly Likable, and Strained Seriousness. I also wrote new reviews for Johnnie To’s The Mission and Patrick Tam’s Final Victory, along with a preview of this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards.

If you like what I do here or at Seattle Screen Scene, The Chinese Cinema, or anywhere else, please consider donating at my kofi page. Every little bit helps.

These are the movies I’ve watched or rewatched over the last few weeks, and where they place on my year-by-year rankings.